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Posted 20 hours ago

A Room Made of Leaves

£8.495£16.99Clearance
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View image in fullscreen Australian author Kate Grenville has always been fascinated by women’s hidden stories. A Room Made of Leaves is the internationally acclaimed author Kate Grenville's first novel in almost a decade. However, upon reading the authors notes at the end of the book I discovered that in fact the story that I had just read was actual fiction and the editors notes at the beginning where in fact false.

At the centre of A Room Made of Leaves is one of the most toxic issues of our own age: the seductive appeal of false stories. The portrayals of the historical characters are entirely plausible developments from the historical record. I listened to the audiobook version narrated by Valerie Bader and was initially daunted when I saw it had 131 chapters.I felt as though I was living through her, I had traveled back in time to this unknown land and all of a sudden history was been stitched together in front of me. Grenville cleverly uses Elizabeth’s bland and pleasant missives home, showing that they were a carefully constructed fiction. Also the shadow of land theft still is cast long and is continuing to be long overdue for a resolution.

This book tells her story as she settles in New South Wales, learns to manage her husband and makes a life for herself and her children in the colony. How many people will read this novel and believe it is fact instead of fiction, despite Ms Grenville’s disclaimer? The slipping of the mask gave me a way to sneak in behind the myth and explore something more interesting, and possibly more true.

I had been leaning up at the windowsill, listening in an idle way, not much concerned whether they saw me, but at that I sank down out of sight and crouched against the wall, making myself shrink to the smallest volume. As usual, he’s full of confidence, dismisses reports of troubles in the colony and seems to have no concerns about taking wife and young son half way across the world. She and John and their infant son landed in a new, raw, violent, hungry penal colony – a thousand convicts and a couple of hundred guards – six months’ sail from home.

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